With great risk comes great reward in baseball, whether played on actual diamonds or the ones found in digital fantasy leagues. It’s not a monumental challenge to assemble an 81-win team in Major League Baseball or finish fifth in your 12-team fantasy league. But who wants to be an also-ran?
At some point, every victor is going to have to risk something, take a chance on that delicious upside even when the benefits are far from guaranteed. Going through the ZiPS projections for 2020, here are some of my favorite high-upside gambles, for real life teams or in fantasy. This will also include the 90% and 10% projections for ERA and FanGraphs-blend WAR for pitchers, and average, OBP and slugging for hitters, as best- and worst-case scenarios for each player to give you a sense of the range of the risk for each of these 10 players.